


For Steph

by TrashCandy



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: F/F, Grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2018-12-30 02:56:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12099195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrashCandy/pseuds/TrashCandy
Summary: If only there were repair manuals for people like there were for lasers and grinders and stingrays.





	1. Goodnight Kiss

“And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in.”

— Haruki Murakami

⁂⁂⁂

Your boots grow heavy as you approach your apartment door. You could leave. Nothing is stopping you from turning around and heading back to the Emporium. No, you didn't get enough customers to keep you distracted today. There's always the Up Over. You know it's Moxxi's job to pretend like she cares when she listens to you. Maybe you're only fooling yourself in those moments when you believe she cares, and you _know_ you're only fooling yourself when you think that smile was anything more than friendly. But Moxxi doesn't realize just how important it is to you to have someone to talk to, somebody you're not afraid of showing your own fears and frustrations. Sometimes, hearing Moxxi tell you everything will be okay is the only thing that's given you enough strength to put that smile on your face.

Ah, but then the black claw of guilt throttles your throat, seizes your stomach. More than you'd dare admit, you've thought of taking that business-like sympathy of Moxxi's too far. Of course you could leave. That would be easy. To not live in a home where your emotions are constantly boiling at your surface, where you don't dread opening your mouth for fear of a fight.

The lock clicks, and you push the door open. The dead silence buffets you, but you force the door closed behind you. You call out her name, not expecting a response and neither receiving one. She probably hasn't gotten out of bed.

Your stomach's acrobatics tell you you're not ready to face her just yet. You head to the kitchen, not out of any conscious decision, but to delay the inevitable. The cheese you had taken out that morning while packing your lunch still sits on the counter. You put it back in the fridge, and notice the emerald glint of the half-finished bottle of Letonian merlot.

You roll your head from side to side, rubbing your stiff shoulders, the thought that you could _still_ walk out the door never far from your focus. You pour yourself a glass, raise it to your lips, letting the faint scent of grape and stactus fruit tickle your nose, then take a long, slow drink. Your shoulders feel a little lighter.

What will it be today? You two haven't been in the same emotional space for a while now. All you want to do is take a pill, hide under the covers, and fall into a restful, dreamless sleep. Maybe today, she'll be angry at the universe. Angry at you. Angry at herself.

And there's nothing you want more than to wrap yourself around her, to be the sunlight in her sky. But you don't know how. She's not the grinder, you can't gather her broken pieces and reassemble her into wholeness. You try to show her you still love her, but she can't feel it. You try to say something, anything to make her feel better, but, in your desperation, sometimes the only words you can find end up cutting her deeper.

And then nobody is there to give you support.

You down the rest of your glass, feeling the bottle's weight in your hand before putting it back into the fridge. No sense in delaying the inevitable.

You push open the bedroom door, not allowing yourself to linger. The bed is unmade, empty. As you check the bathroom and find it empty, too, you wonder if she managed to make it out of the apartment, but quickly shake off the thought. You're just glad she made it out of bed.

And so you find yourself staring down the door of the only room you haven't checked. You might have noticed it was cracked open if, you hadn't averted your eyes as you passed.

The brass knob chills your palm. Everything inside you screams at you to turn around. But you can't.

It's just as you remember it, every agonizing detail. The spotted plush rakk suspended by string from the ceiling. Your old teddy bear on the windowsill. The open book sitting on the table by the window, her half-finished drawing of a beady-eyed cartoon kraggon beside your scribbled story drafts.

The empty bassinet.

She sits on the floor, still in her pajamas, her head resting against the side of the mauve cradle, clutching a lavender swaddling blanket.

You squeeze your eyes shut, forcing back the welling tears. The air, stuffy and thick, presses into your chest, catches in your throat. Everything inside you begs you to turn around, so you focus on the one thing in the room that you can look at without being stabbed in the heart: her.

Kneeling beside her, you lean in and kiss her forehead, her cheek. Her eyes drift from the blanket to your hand, and she lets out a wounded sob. You look down at the faint pink line across your thumb, where you cut yourself assembling the cradle.

The dark circles under her walnut eyes betray the effort, the strength it took her to come into the nursery. You want nothing more than to let your own tears flow with hers, but now isn't the time. You have to care for her. She has never needed you more badly than she needs you now. And so, you hold her, soothe her hair, kiss away her tears. You whisper sweet platitudes into her ear, knowing the only voice that she could possibly hear in this room is Nurse Nina's, stumbling for just the right words so that she might at least _delicately_ turn your hopes and plans for the future into your worst fucking nightmare.

Once you pull yourself from your own thoughts, you notice how her taut arms squeeze your ribs, how her hands clutch at your shirt, how her voice hitches as she whispers your name as if she's suffocating and gasping for oxygen: “ _Janey_...”

You hold her tighter, afraid if you let go, she may vanish into nothingness.

Your pain can't compare to hers. The clothes she picked out, the glow in her eyes as she laid your hand on her abdomen, the weight she literally carried. She paid the price of a daughter. But all she has to hold onto is your hand, and the flimsy stack of papers she looks down at now. The first book you completed together. Memories crash over you, lodge themselves in a hard lump in your chest. Late nights, living off coffee, with the occasional splash of whiskey. The scratching of her pencil as she sketches away the landscapes you describe. Her relentless mocking of your decision to name the protagonist “Craggy the Kraggon”. The two of you lying awake in bed, staring up past the ceiling, trying to think up the perfect words for the dedication, before convincing yourselves that keeping it simple would be best.

Those moments might as well be from someone else's life.

You rest your head against hers. Your own darkness doesn't matter. Not as long as she hurts, and not as long as you have her in your arms. And so you'll stay with her, cradling her, telling her you'll always be there. You'll do it for the same reason you always have.

Not for yourself. Not even for her, not entirely.

For the same reason both of you stayed up night after night, working on that stupid children's book. The same reason etched in her looped script on its rumpled first page, that she caresses with a trembling finger.

For Steph.

 


	2. Searching for Answers

"A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passersby only see a wisp of smoke."

— Vincent Van Gogh

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

By the time she slinks into your bedroom, you've been waiting for three hours, awake, alone in your bed. You whisper her name, firmly, and your stomach sinks as she stops in place. You flick the switch on the nightstand, and the room is bathed in a soft, blue light.

She is frozen, her walnut eyes staring back at you. She doesn't speak, but the boots tucked under her arm and her hair, still damp, tell you enough. Locking gazes with her, you plead with her. Say it isn't so, say you're imagining it, say  _anything_. She wouldn't do something like this to you.

The silence is your answer, and it pierces your heart worse than words ever could.

You can't look at her anymore. All the emotions you've kept buried for her sake the past weeks are boiling to the surface. Your jaw tenses and the blood pounds in your temples.  _Fuck_  her. Fuck her for doing this to you, after you suppressed all your own misery so you could function enough to care for her. Fuck her for fooling around with some dumb cunt who can't even understand the tiniest fraction of the pain either of you have been through. Fuck her for not even coming out and saying it.

But above all, fuck her for taking her own burden and shoving it onto you. Because everything hinges on what you say to her now. And if you lose it now, you will lose her, too.

You need to get out. You need to get out. You need to get out. Before you say something you can't take back.

Her bottom lip trembles as she watches you, awaiting your response. Without a word, you throw on the first set of clothes you find in the closet. She starts breaking down. She keeps saying it was a mistake and begs you to stay and talk about it.

When she tries to wrap her arms around your shoulders, you firmly shrug her off and storm out the door.

How could you be so stupid? How did you think she could ever look at you the same after what you went through? All you'll ever be to her is a reminder of the worst day of her life. You couldn't give her what she needed, so why shouldn't she go looking elsewhere? After all, you've been tempted before. But your temptation wasn't Moxxi. Your temptation was running away from having to deal with what happened. That was a luxury she never had. It wasn't  _your_  body, it wasn't  _your_  tainted blood.

You felt her slipping away from you but you didn't do a fucking thing to stop it. You couldn't.

But when you needed her tonight, where was she?

You don't remember taking your stingray to the outback as you stare out over the rolling lunar desert. A dim streak of light sails slowly through the stars, a bit of space rock passing through Elpis's sparse atmosphere. A stray shuggurath lurks to the west, away from the dim glow of the sun on the horizon to your left. A shuttle shoots off from the Concordia spaceport, and for a fleeting moment, you can see yourself on it. Fleeing the pain.

The oz kit hisses as it recirculates your air, its bubble around your head emitting a soft thrum. As you become more aware of the noise, your own breathing deepens, drowning it out. Your chest heaves more and more painfully as your breathing quickens, deepens. You reach a trembling hand for its power supply.

The protective bubble around your head bursts. Choking on your own pain, you crumple to your knees, throw your head back, and let out a throat-scratching scream into the vacuum, raging at the impossibly vast and indifferent universe, and wondering how is it that in a world that still has so much beauty and color to offer, you are so hollow and gray.

Strings of spit fly from your mouth, but you can't hear your voice over the blood rushing through your head.

You can't forget the wounded look in her eyes. The look that you're undeserving, unworthy of what you have. What did it give her that she couldn't show to you anymore?

Lungs burning, eyes watering, a loud hiss fills your ears as you reactivate your oz kit. You take a few labored breaths before slowly picking your head up and looking at the barren horizon.

Is she relieved you found out?

After Steph, you swore to yourself you wouldn't let yourselves become one of Those Couples. You were stronger than this. Too strong to be defined by your loss. Deep down, you know you can still have a beautiful life together. This pain is only a testament to how deeply you care for her. You won't give up on this. On her.

You hope the fact that she came back to you tonight means she feels the same. Because that question always sticks in your mind, as affirming as it is terrifying:

What would you be, without her?

All the questions in the world won't help anything. The answer to the only question that mattered was written all over her tear-streaked face.

When you open the front door to your apartment, she's curled up on the couch, awake, alone. She whispers your name, as if she's dreaming. You wrap your arms around her, so that she knows she's not.

Maybe tomorrow, your curiosity will get the better of you. Maybe you'll demand all the sordid details that will only leave the both of you broken and sobbing and empty.

Tonight, the only answers you need are written on her body, awaiting your desperate touch.

She squeezes you tight in her arms, her forehead resting on your shoulder. "I'm sorry," she whispers, "I'm so sorry."

You hush her, losing your fingers in her thick, curly hair, telling her you know, you know she's sorry. Both of you know too well the gnawing emptiness of being alone. Maybe you're both to blame. Maybe neither of you are. None of it matters now. What matters is the swell of her bottom lip pressing against yours, the way her body trembles under your fingers, the way she whispers your name gently, as if her breath might be enough to shatter it: " _Janey_..."

You quiet her by pressing your lips to hers. You don't need to hear her say she loves you.

You need to drown in the depths of her eyes, so near and so true. You need the chill in your spine as she moans in your ear. You need the golden warmth of her kiss, the silver caress of her fingers.

You need to feel every truth that is etched into her skin.


	3. Something Broken

"...Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait 'til the incomprehensible power that has broken you restores you a little. I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you."

— Marcel Proust

⁂  ⁂  ⁂

It's your fault she died.

If only you hadn't gotten up in the middle of the night. If only you hadn't talked her into taking a weekend in the outback, just the two of you. If only you'd forgotten to take your ECHO with you when you left your campsite, she never would have come running after the first kraggon attacked you – since she never would've heard you screaming. Being torn limb from limb feels like a small price to pay next to losing her. But the lingering voice in your head wonders if leaving her alone with this kind of pain would have been crueler.

If only you'd never met her in the first place. Wouldn't that be easiest?

You open the door to your apartment, some awful part of you expecting her to greet you with a beaming smile, her  _actual_  smile, not the one from the framed photo on the wall of the two of you, half of your own grinning face buried in the crook of her neck.

Maybe you're being cruel to yourself, leaving her things undisturbed, as if she's simply  _away_. But deep down you know it doesn't matter. She is no longer with you. But she will always be all around you. She is the scribbled note on the fridge telling you to pick up milk on your way back from the Emporium. She is the couch you both fell asleep on the night your mum died. She is the coat you bought for yourself a year before you met her (that always looked better on her, anyway). She is the second plate and glass you set out for dinner, just before you bury your face in your hands and wonder if you really are losing your mind.

She is so much of you that it's no wonder why you aren't fazed about Zarpedon ending the world. Yours ended the night she died in your arms.

Even in your own bedroom, you can't help but feel like an intruder. This room was never meant for you alone. Your bed is so wide and empty. You can still see the dent in the pillow where she laid her head beside you.

You shuffle into the bathroom to brush your teeth, your boots feeling as if they're made of lead, and for a horrible moment, you could swear you saw her in the mirror behind you, smiling, leaning in to kiss your neck. But as soon as you blink, she's gone again, and you're left looking for her, clinging for a fading scene from a memory.

The thick salve leaves a slight chill in your palm. Gingerly, you lift up your shirt and take a deep breath as you examine the burns covering half your torso. The heat flares up as soon as the cream touches the your side, and tears fight against your tightly closed eyelids as you wince your way through spreading it all over your raw, reddened skin. The burning is a welcome distraction to focus on, but the pain fades all too quickly, and your mind, as always, retreats to thoughts of her.

Your friends tell you that you shouldn't dwell, that she'd want you to be happy, but they can fuck right off. They didn't know her like you did. They didn't love her like you did. She wouldn't tell you to move on as if nothing had happened, and she sure as hell wouldn't tell you to be strong. You've tried to be strong since that horrible day in Nina's clinic. What did it get you? An empty home. A lonely bed. A black night under a starless sky.

You sit back on the mattress, and immediately your shoulders feel weighed down. Your eyes feel as if they're being pressed from behind, and the shadows in your bedroom shift and waver. What you wouldn't give to wake up from this nightmare. To have just one day that doesn't slip through your mind like mist, one day where you can feel something,  _any_ thing other than the crushing emptiness that mires you down from the moment you wake up. What you wouldn't give even to be able to cry again.

You lie back into bed and close your eyes, your left hand finding its usual spot of where her shoulder should be. Lingering on her pillow, you can smell the eucalyptus oil she rubs into her face every night. You can see her now, sitting on the end of the mattress, the blue light of your bedroom casting a faint glow over her sepia skin. You can feel the coarse texture of her thick curly hair perfectly framing her face.

You can taste her like a mouthful of blood.

All there is to do now is hope the sleeping pills take effect. Maybe you'll dream of her. Get to hear her low voice, taste the heat of her lips against yours. Maybe she'll be holding Steph in her arms, and you'll lose your breath as one of those tiny hands curls around your finger. Maybe, for the briefest moment tonight, you'll feel alive.

Until you wake up, and lose them all over again.


End file.
